City studying downtown transportation

Determining just what’s going with transportation planning for downtown can be challenging. Grabbing headlines of late, it has been all about streetcar.

The city and VIA Metropolitan Transit are now in a holding pattern regarding streetcar. Last night, for example, Councilwoman Elisa Chan hosted a public meeting to sort of weigh the city’s north-south route version against VIA’s east-west-with-two stations plan.

Just whose court has the ball remains unclear.

Flying under the radar is the city’s own downtown transportation study, an all-encompassing look at all modes, from streetcar to the pata mobile.

“We want to improve access coming into downtown and leaving downtown,” said Luis Maltos, a project manager with Capital Improvement Management Services, who is overseeing this project. “We want to improve circulation into downtown.

“We’re focusing on all modes of transportation. Our big focus is on vehicular traffic, pedestrian traffic, bicyclists and, of course, transit, as well.”

The plan, according to Maltos, will identify downtown streets’ primary functions.

“Is this road intended for transit?” Maltos said. “Is this road intended for pedestrian use? Is this road intended for delivery trucks or bicycles? Depending on the use, our consultant will determine the street typology. For instance, how many lanes? How wide of our sidewalks? What kind of streetscape are we looking at? What kind of amenities do our streets needs to have? And hopefully this will begin to set some guidelines for future development downtown.”

The study will also consider how downtown connects with the surrounding neighborhoods. The study’s periphery will go as far east as Cherry, as far west as the railroad tracks, to the north to about the Pearl, and as far south at I-10 (past Southtown and Lavaca).

Three weeks ago, City council approved a $1.2 million contract for Pape-Dawson Engineers Inc. to conduct the study. Most of the $1.2 million came from 2007-2012 bond savings

The complete study is expected to be out in May 2012, but in order to meet the 2012 bond deadline, projects have to be identified by the end of the year.

How these projects interlock with streetcar remains to be seen. Although this interview with Maltos took place before Mayor Julián Castro unveiled his own street car plan, Maltos made it clear whatever streetcar plan is adopted will be folded into the city’s downtown transportation.

The same goes for the street work being planned for Alamo and Chavez as one of the first phases of the redevelopment of HemisFair Park.

Maltos happens to be the project manager for the HemisFair Park complete streets project, too, and said he expects a contractor to go before council in late October.

“Whatever comes from HemisFair will be implemented into (the city’s) study,” Maltos said.

Maltos said the design for the HemisFair Park complete streets project could be completed by November 2012, which would put the project’s ground breaking at early 2013.